The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis or its editors.

Let’s say your company is making progress toward reducing its overall environmental impact but wants to go further to compensate for the hardest-to-abate emissions. You know your peers are purchasing carbon credits to do so, but you’ve seen too many examples of a company buying the wrong kind and attracting negative media coverage — or spending way more money than you can afford.

Those concerns are not unfounded. But high quality is not always high cost. A recent Trellis article by Jim Giles highlighted three companies, Autodesk, EY and Salesforce, that topped the Calyx Global “large buyer” leaderboard for purchasing high-quality carbon credits. All have done so putting together portfolios of credits that are not only high quality but also control costs. 

This article dives deeper into the credits purchased by two buyers on Calyx Global’s leaderboard—one large- and one small-volume buyer. It illustrates two journeys to high-quality carbon credit portfolios within two very different budgets, and why these companies’ paths make me optimistic about the future of carbon markets.

Large buyers diversify opportunities and risks

All three large buyers on the leaderboard — Autodesk, EY and Salesforce — purchased a diversified portfolio of credits. So what did they buy? Each combined nature-based credits with “super pollutant” credits. 

I recently spoke with Valerie Lossman, environmental sustainability strategy and operations leader at EY (formerly Ernst & Young). She explained how EY addresses residual emissions within a broader, integrity-led net-zero strategy. EY purchased around 600,000 metric tons of higher-quality super-pollutant credits and over 300,000 nature-based credits. I asked how EY chooses their portfolio.

EY’s diversified portfolio approach balances different credit types to manage risk while delivering a broader set of outcomes, Lossman explained. The company expanded into super-pollutant credits, which provide high-confidence emissions reductions, alongside nature-based credits that generate important co-benefits for biodiversity and local communities. “We intentionally incorporate both technology-based and nature-based solutions to reflect the interconnected nature of climate and ecosystems aiming to deliver value beyond carbon mitigation alone,” Lossman said.

Small buyers test the waters and build budget-friendly portfolios 

Smaller buyers are also moving to higher quality. In 2024, Williams College conducted a wholesale review of its approach in response to critical studies coming out about the quality of carbon credits. Officials wanted to know: “Did we make the right purchases?” 

Following the review, Williams began with a small trial run of offset purchases to analyze and decide if their process was workable before committing the college to annual purchases, said Tanja Srebotnjak, Williams’ Executive Director of the Zilkha Center for the Environment. Ultimately, the college selected a portfolio of high-quality credits. 

“Purchasing carbon credits and the not-insignificant budget that goes toward that is in some ways also a reminder that there is a cost to emissions, which helps us incentivize carbon reductions on campus,” said Srebotnjak. 

The bulk of Williams’ purchases last year came from a super-pollutant project, which scored high for affordability. However, Williams also wanted to go further to support emerging technologies, so it purchased a small number of more expensive credits from a biochar project.

Srebotnjak said that over time she has become more confident in becoming a competent buyer in the market. “For smaller institutions or those just getting started, you don’t need to know everything on Day 1. It can be a process of learning and iteration.” Her budget for purchasing offsets has grown, as she has been able to increasingly make the case for maintaining carbon neutrality.

From market pessimism to optimism

A shift to higher standards has accelerated in the past few years. The chart below shows the integrity of credit retirements over time, aggregating the top seven buyers on the Calyx Global leaderboards. The improvement is notable. 

Source: Calyx Global. Based on public information and Calyx Global ratings

Many buyers lost confidence in 2023, when quality problems with VCM credits came to light. Today, many companies are pivoting to higher quality credit purchases — suggesting that confidence is returning to the market. 

Some key lessons:

Start small. If you have not yet purchased carbon credits, follow Williams College’s example and buy a small amount, testing the process to see how it feels. Then iterate.

Diversify. One way to manage benefits and risks is to buy from multiple projects. EY selected projects for their high integrity, but also looked for “beyond carbon” benefits. Williams purchased super-pollutant credits, which are more cost effective, but balanced these with a small purchase of durable removals.

Improve continuously. EY said it continuously refines its criteria to reflect market developments. Similarly, Williams got started and layered onto its approach new tools to improve due diligence.

Build confidence in steps. Williams was able to start small and, over time, build confidence with internal stakeholders. This allowed the college to increase its budget and to maintain its carbon-neutral objectives.

Many companies follow the guidance of the Science-based Targets Initiative, which is set to adopt new guidance this year that may include recognition for near-term action that includes the use of carbon credits. If this helps get companies off the sidelines, and they follow the lead of organizations such as EY and Williams College, I believe the carbon market can turn a corner and become a more impactful tool to protect our planet.

Join Calyx Global, HKS and Workday for a panel session on “How to Secure Carbon Credits that Deliver Maximum Climate Benefits” at Trellis Impact 26 on June 23. Register by June 19 to save $200.

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The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis or its editors.

The conditions shaping corporate sustainability have not only intensified —  they’ve broken in ways few expected. Last year we examined the public posture of 75 multinational companies to determine how political pressure was influencing their climate commitments and sustainability strategies. Using only publicly available information, we analyzed whether companies were progressing, holding steady or retrenching, and to what extent their actions matched the public narrative. (For more detail on the companies examined, see below.)

The result, originally published in Harvard Business Review, pointed to the rise of “greenhushing” as a response to the volatility, where a reduction of public exposure and communication intentionally masks programs that not only remain intact, but are in many cases accelerating. 

One year later, intensifying political pushback in the U.S., combined with tightening regulatory expectations in Europe, has created an even more fractured global landscape, raising the question: Will corporate climate ambitions continue to retreat under sustained pressure, or be reshaped by it? 

We revisited the same 75 companies to determine how responses are evolving one year later.

Across our findings, commitments appear stable in the aggregate — but beneath the surface those firms have materially adapted their strategies, communication and implementation, often in contradictory ways. This is not a simple story of retreat or progress. The research from this secondary observational period, extending through early 2026, reflects a deeper transformation: companies are no longer responding to a single set of expectations, but to multiple, overlapping markets that do not consistently align.

For sustainability leaders, the challenge is no longer deciding what commitments to make; it’s how to maintain coherence in a system that is no longer inherently coherent.

Three modes of fragmentation  

If companies are no longer moving in sync, what is driving that divergence? The data points to three distinct shifts:

Stability is a false signal: Public commitments may appear stable, but comparing strategy across peer groups obscures how rapidly positions are shifting in practice. The direction of travel is a stronger signal; understanding how companies are evolving is more valuable than where they stand at a single point in time.

The global playbook is fragmenting: Companies are adapting to regional policy conditions that increasingly drive strategy in different directions. While tightening European regulation has long driven convergence in global corporate sustainability strategy, its influence today is being challenged by competing political and market forces. Rather than responding to a single regulatory center of gravity, companies are increasingly navigating multiple coexisting systems shaping corporate behavior.

Coherence is breaking down within firms: Commitments, governance, policy engagement and institutional affiliations no longer reliably reinforce one another. The result is a proliferation of mixed signals from individual corporations across markets, functions and stakeholders — and the introduction of visible credibility risks.

These trends point to a structural change in how sustainability strategy is developed and managed. Climate commitments no longer represent a unified, consistent signal; They are shaped by how firms navigate competing pressures across regions, functions and institutional contexts. For sustainability leaders, the challenge is no longer simply to set direction, but to manage tradeoffs across systems where competing pressures cannot always be reconciled. The task is no longer to eliminate uncertainty, but to manage it while continuing to move forward.  

How to make progress without a playbook 

If the playbook no longer holds, how should companies respond? Here are five shifts in managing sustainability strategy today:

Track movement, not just commitments: Most companies benchmark climate strategy using static commitments — but those are increasingly lagging indicators. What matters now is not where a company stands, but how it is moving. Start by revisiting your core peer group and tracking how governance signals and external engagement have shifted over the past 6-12 months. The advantage comes from understanding movement across fragmented signals, not just measuring it at a point in time.

Don’t try to force global consistency: Many companies still try to apply a single sustainability strategy globally, even where it’s regionally unstable. In practice, political, regulatory and stakeholder pressures are diverging in ways that require fundamentally different approaches by market. Start by identifying where your current strategy is enabled by regional context — and where it breaks down. The difficulty is that most organizations lack a framework for responding to deliberate strategic divergence without creating unintentional misalignment.

Actively manage internal conflict: Climate commitments are often treated as a coordination challenge — but now they function as a source of conflict. Sustainability, policy, legal and communications teams often optimize for competing objectives while working toward the same goal. Start by identifying where these tensions are already surfacing and make them explicit by grounding decisions in the signal from regional teams closest to market realities. The advantage comes from navigating these tradeoffs intentionally rather than letting them play out implicitly.

Leverage institutional complexity: Companies often treat external affiliations as background context rather than strategic inputs. But in a fragmented system, maintaining relationships across organizations with differing positions should be strategic, not a liability. Start by mapping how affiliations shape your exposure across markets, where they enable regional flexibility and where they magnify risk. The advantage comes from proactively managing conflict rather than reducing it. 

Redefine coherence to manage contradiction: Most companies still treat coherence as consistency, aligning commitments, governance and external engagement into a single position. But in a fragmented system,  contradiction is not always a failure of strategy; it can be a defining feature. Start by identifying where competing signals exist, whether those differences are intentional and where they create an advantage. The ultimate optimization is not eliminating inconsistency but controlling it. 

The limits going it alone

Corporate sustainability is no longer defined by ambition, but by constraints. Leaders are not retreating or waiting for clarity; they’re actively managing strategy across conditions they don’t control. The companies that move ahead will be those willing to define new paths within these constraints, rather than waiting for them to resolve.

We hope you’ll join us in exploring these questions with sustainability leaders at Trellis Impact 26, June 23-25 in San Francisco. Kelly will be hosting a roundtable lunch on June 24. 

The cohort of 75 multinational companies is composed of the top 25 companies by market capitalization of the S&P 100, Stoxx Europe and Fortune 500 listings as of March 1, 2025. The complete methodology and analysis for the original research and observational window of study can be found here, while the expanded methodology and analysis for the second observation window can be found here.

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This April, some of the biggest names in sustainability gathered at the neoclassical Gotham Hall in midtown Manhattan to toast the quarter-century anniversary of environmental disclosure platform CDP, one of the profession’s most notable organizations. 

More than 22,000 respondents shared emissions data with CDP last year, including businesses that together are responsible for nearly two-thirds of global market capitalization. 

Today, though, that relationship is fraying. Companies have long grumbled about CDP’s bureaucracy and fees. More recently, as mandatory disclosure laws proliferate, some have started asking whether voluntary reporting is even needed. The data suggests that at least a few think it isn’t: For the first time, the number of reporting companies fell in 2025. 

CDP asserts that its role remains critical because it ensures that data is not just reported but used — by investors, supply-chain partners and others. Nonetheless, recent developments raise an uncomfortable question: Are companies ready to break up with CDP?

‘Wildly successful’

CDP launched in 2001 and received 235 responses from companies, cities and states to its initial emissions data request. Some recipients had no idea where to start: In a 2022 podcast, CDP co-founder Paul Dickinson recalled a large logistics company that claimed it had no emissions to report. Dickinson asked if it was sure. Well, none except from the trucks and airplanes, the company replied. 

Things are very different now. In addition to emissions, CDP asks about water use, forests, plastics, oceans and biodiversity. The organization has also expanded beyond its original mission of helping investors understand and engage with corporate environmental strategies. Companies that pay to join CDP’s Supply Chain program, for example, can use the platform to send disclosure requests to suppliers. More than 45,000 businesses were asked to share data in this way in 2025. For suppliers, the process allows them to complete a single disclosure that multiple customers can use.

Today, though, some form of the emissions disclosure that CDP has pushed on a voluntary basis is, or will soon be, mandatory in more than 40 jurisdictions worldwide, from California to Qatar.

“It’s much easier to legislate for something if people are already doing it voluntarily,” said Owen Hewlett, chief technical officer at Gold Standard, a leading standards-setter for carbon credits and related projects. “So you’d have to say that it’s been wildly successful.”

Failing grade

Moments of tension between standards bodies and companies are inevitable. The GHG Protocol’s proposal to change how emissions from electricity generation are accounted for sparked an ongoing, sometimes heated, dispute. Frustration has also arisen over a recent rules change at the Science Based Targets initiative.

In CDP’s case, opaque bureaucracy has often been the focus. The 2024 disclosure cycle, for example, was marred by technical glitches. The following year, an unrelated issue caused what CDP describes as “isolated” problems. 

One sustainability team member at a well-known U.S. company, who asked to remain anonymous because she was not authorized to discuss the incident, described receiving a D grade for the firm’s 2024 disclosure. The result was a “complete and utter shock” to a company that had previously scored much higher. 

CDP reluctantly agreed not to publish the score and eventually acknowledged that a technical error had wrongly penalized the company. It was regraded with an A-. 

“A small number of scores were affected by a technology error in 2025, where ‘not applicable’ responses were incorrectly marked as ‘unanswered,’ ” said Shannon Joly, CDP’s chief marketing and communications officer. “This was identified and resolved post release, and corrected scores were issued to affected organizations.”

Occasional issues are inevitable when processing submissions from 22,000 companies. Yet the 2025 problems came in the same year that CDP laid off one-fifth of its staff, in part to channel more money into improving its technology.

Many other sustainability professionals have related tales of frustration in off-the-record conversations. A transport-industry professional said his company submits but asks not be scored, pointing out that some oil and gas companies have been awarded relatively high scores. “Who wants to score lower than them?” he asked. Others are no longer submitting at all: One tech-company employee said that after years of disclosing she can no longer justify the time, and investors are not asking her to do so.

Companies disclosing to CDP

Joly declined to offer reasons behind the recent fall in submissions, but one potential cause is the global growth in mandatory disclosure requirements. After years of fragmented approaches, international standards have coalesced around rulebooks created by the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). The board is overseen by the same organization — the IFRS Foundation — that sets global rules for financial reporting. 

Some companies are starting to point investors and other stakeholders with sustainability questions to these mandatory disclosures, said Pamela Gill-Alabaster, a former sustainability leader at Mattel and healthcare company Kenvue who now teaches at Columbia University. A study released last year by the University of Zurich examined disclosures from more than 3,400 companies in 36 countries and found that the likelihood of a company disclosing to CDP dropped by 5.5 percent since the introduction of a mandatory disclosure requirement.

“CDP played a really essential role in building the market, but regulation has redefined the architecture for reporting,” Gill-Alabaster said.

Alternative futures

This suggests that disclosures to CDP — and the organization’s relevance — may continue to slowly decline. But that’s far from a foregone conclusion, in part because mandatory systems have shortcomings that CDP is well placed to address. 

The organization supports the alignment of reporting standards, said Joly, but a voluntary option remains critical. “CDP is ensuring the data is not simply reported, but being used by a multitude of actors spanning businesses, financial markets, investors and policy makers. This provides more comprehensive insights into risks, dependencies and opportunities, and helps to fill key information gaps across markets and value chains.” 

There’s also the issue of data quality. Disclosures to the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and other systems are published on company websites rather than in a central system, making it challenging to compare sectors and companies. There are startups using AI to extract data from company reports and assemble it in a single platform, but the results often contain errors. CDP’s data, which comes directly from its questionnaires, remains superior for now, said Maximilian Müller, a financial accounting expert at the University of Cologne.

As a nonprofit with a stated agenda — to enable “Earth-positive decisions to protect future generations” — CDP can also pursue broader goals than those enshrined in disclosure regulations, which tend to focus on the risks and opportunities associated with climate change rather than on company impact. (The EU is a notable exception — its rules also address impact.) 

To put it another way: Having had great success with the disclosure challenge, CDP might now set itself new and more ambitious goals. “There is room for an organization to bring together a more holistic reporting across climate and nature and in a more efficient way, and then continue to drive best practice,” said Hewlett. 

Perhaps CDP continues in its traditional role — part facilitator, part motivator, part castigator — but with a broader focus. It might not be loved by all the companies that work with it, but that’s not the point. What matters is that there’s still enough common ground — a desire to make progress on sustainability — to keep the relationship together.

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An international coalition of businesses, governments, nonprofits, designers and packaging companies has introduced a universal identification symbol for reusable containers akin to the “chasing arrows” triangle used to flag materials that can be recycled.

The symbol — an arrow that loops back on itself — was one of 236 submissions in a year-long global design competition convened by PR3: The Global Alliance to Advance Reuse. It was designed by Epigrama Studios of Bogota, Colombia, and chosen after a jury review and market tests involving close to 1,300 consumers. The symbol is officially operational as of June 3.

“For reuse to succeed, people need clear, consistent cues that make participation feel intuitive and convenient,” said Marco Cimatti, former design director at PepsiCo and one of the jurors. “The new mark creates a unifying visual language for reuse systems. Designed with bold simplicity in mind, it balances uniqueness with a strong visual signal to reuse.” 

PR3, launched in 2019, is responsible for standards related to reusable packaging and products. It is collaborating with certification company CSA Group on six frameworks that dictate how companies can use reusable packaging; so far, two have been released. 

Difficult to scale

Reusable packages are generally defined as those that can be kept in circulation for 10 to 100 uses before needing to be recycled or re-manufactured for other applications.

Considered an environmentally preferred alternative to single-use options, they could, if widely adopted, reduce packaging-related greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent. Fast-food chains including Burger King, Starbucks and KFC are piloting various approaches, including making it simpler for consumers to use refillable cups.

The systems needed for sorting, cleaning and collection, however, are difficult to scale. TerraCycle’s Loop initiative, for example, has been limited to France and retailers like Carrefour after tests in other markets, including the U.S., largely failed.  

The new symbol introduced by PR3 can be used on packaging and reuse equipment once they’ve been certified under the alliance’s marking and labeling standards, which will be published soon by the American National Standards Institute. It will show up on reusable cups, foodware, bottles and other containers, as well as collection, washing, sorting and transportation equipment.

Some service providers are already using the symbols on containers and infrastructure on every continent except Antarctica, said Amy Larkin, co-founder and director of PR3. Examples include Muuse, which manages Starbucks’ reusable cup program in Hong Kong, and Re-Universe, which is collaborating in the U.K. with MasterCard on systems for managing reusable cup deposits.

Most current reuse systems are proprietary, limited to specific items or markets. That means the reusable cup or container dispensed by a restaurant, retailer or consumer products company probably needs to be returned to the same place, where it is cleaned and redistributed. The intent of the new visual marker is to help consumers figure out where items can be dropped off, regardless of system. 

“The reuse symbol — and reuse at large — will be a true success when it proliferates and is recognizable to the average consumer,” Larkin said.

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The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis or its editors.

I’ve got five senses, but somehow none of them feel sufficient for understanding when my peanut butter jar is clean enough to be recycled. And I’m not alone: As long as people have been recycling, they’ve been wondering, “How clean is clean enough?” Can this pizza box get recycled with grease on it? Will my takeout tikka masala container make it to its next life?   

These are valid questions. The municipal collection programs taking our recycling have long communicated that packaging needs to be food-free and close to dry before recycling it. Packaging without food residue helps the people sorting recyclables at material recovery facilities minimize problems with odors, pests, sortation equipment or — worse yet — contamination that prevents sorted materials from being sold to or used by recyclers. 

Right now, there’s no consensus around what percent of recycled paper packaging gets tossed due to contamination. But we know that food residue can be problematic for recycling. Just how problematic is it for paper-based food packaging? And when can we call a package clean enough?  

As consumer preference for paper-based packaging continues to rise, a new study from the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) investigates the issues created by food residue on recyclable paper packaging — and how the industry can minimize residue to keep valuable materials in circulation.  

Grease not bits 

We interviewed dozens of recyclers to determine their tolerance for food residue and found some good news. Most paper recycling facilities only see food residue as a minor issue — hurray for scraping your paper takeout containers! But most recyclers are at capacity: None of the recyclers interviewed in the study are open to receiving any more food residue than they’re already seeing.   

Because food residue can be difficult for paper recyclers to define and quantitatively measure, we have to rely on qualitative indicators and definitions that help illustrate the level at which food residue becomes a disqualifying issue.  

Recyclers and brokers were asked at which point food residue would disqualify a piece of packaging for recycling. The industry converged on the amount of food shown in bowl No. 3. Source: SPC

We asked recyclers and packaging material brokers the point at which food residue would disqualify a piece of packaging for recycling. Respondents concentrated their answers around the third picture, in a threshold that can be described as “We don’t want actual pieces of food entering our operations.” Food material absorbed into the paper itself, such as grease, is less of a concern, but actual food pieces have a higher likelihood of causing pests, odors, or reducing the quality of the final sorted paper. In other words: Greasy paper packaging beats unscraped paper packaging.  

These findings are consistent with other research conducted on food contamination, namely Smurfit WestRock’s seminal 2019 study on corrugated cardboard pizza boxes, which found that typical amounts of residual grease and cheese do not negatively affect the boxes’ recyclability.  

So, food residue isn’t a dealbreaker for paper packaging — but that doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. The real questions now are: Do consumers know what “clean enough” looks like, and will they get there?  

How to keep paper-based food packaging recyclable  

The second portion of our study went to a different source: consumers. In collaboration with Clemson University, the SPC studied the impact of on-pack messaging and education on consumer actions around cleaning food residue off of packaging before recycling. More good news for packaging producers: There’s a needle to move and we know how to move it.  

On-pack messaging, particularly when paired with education, helps consumers correctly prepare packaging for recycling. While most consumers surveyed (80 percent) know implicitly to clean food residue off of packaging before tossing it in the recycling bin, nearly all participants presented with explicit, on–pack instructions knew what to do with their packaging before recycling.  

A little bonus education went a long way. Participants who received packaging with a How2Recycle label and watched an educational video were twice as likely to properly recycle items that required cleaning, removing at least 50 percent of the original food residue.  

What needs to happen next 

You or I scraping food from paper-based packaging won’t solve the problems of contamination or consumer confusion alone. To keep the paper-based food packaging in circulation, the industry can do three things:  

Build paper industry alignment on food residue thresholds: Alignment between players in the paper packaging industry on what is and is not too much food contamination on paper packaging is a critical first step. 

Identify the right on-pack language to limit confusion: Once we reach consensus around acceptable levels of food contamination, we can then translate those thresholds into clear on-pack language to help consumers understand what level of cleaning a package requires for recycling. 

Support on- and off-pack education: Education doesn’t end at the on-pack recycling label and language. Consumer recycling education campaigns can help make sure consumers know how to look for and use recycling instructions when recycling their packaging. 

Paper packaging recyclability doesn’t depend on perfection, but to curb contamination, progress will hinge on clearer guidance that helps consumers keep valuable fiber in circulation. By aligning on “clean enough,” and communicating that threshold, the industry can recover more paper, waste less material and help reduce pressure on virgin resources like trees.

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